Account Bank Royal Savings

Beginning this year, federal payment recipients will receive their government benefits through electronic funds transfer (EFT)-- what most of us call direct deposit. Although cost-cutting is the driving force behind the move to a virtually all-electronic federal payment system, Michael Stegman believes the initiative has a far broader potential: to bring poor Americans into the banking mainstream.In this book Stegman outlines how many families will enter the mainstream banking system through EFT '99, as the program is called. He explains in careful detail the thinking behind the shift to EFT and the implementation of the program this year. He also argues that, for maximum success, EFT '99 should be combined with a program of national Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), dedicated savings accounts for low-income people that can be used for purchasing a first home, acquiring more education or job training, or starting a small-business. Essentially, EFT '99 will bring people into the banking system, and IDAs will give them an incentive to use the system to its fullest in order to make their money work for them and their children.There are other steps that the government can take to boost EFT's ability to help public aid recipients achieve self-sufficiency. It can: add a direct deposit option to state benefits payments programs; give banks significant additional Community Reinvestment Act Credit for establishing accounts for EFT recipients; and regulate fees for cashing government benefits and voluntary accounts so that people are not charged excessively for accessing their money. This book demonstrates that -- with careful planning and a relatively small investment -- the government'sEFT initiative can have a major payoff in real assets and improved prospects for those who have been, for far too long, on the fringes of the country's mainstream banking system.

The World Bank is the single biggest source of finance for international development, and its policies have a critical impact on the future of more than 110 borrowing countries. In this dramatic and lively new critique, Bruce Rich, internationally known expert on the environment and the World Bank, analyzes how the Bank has become a seemingly unstoppable and often destructive environmental and political force. The author chronicles the life-and-death impact of Bank-funded projects around the world: huge dams that have forced the resettlement of millions of the poorest people on earth, road building and jungle colonization schemes in Brazil, Indonesia, and Africa that have left vast deforestation and social conflict in their wake, and much more. Rich also recounts the bold grassroots campaigns of nongovernmental groups seeking alternatives to Bank-style development. Confidential internal Bank documents expose chronic misrepresentations by Bank management to its donor nations and to the public. Rich reveals how senior officials continue to push money into projects with disastrous ecological and human rights consequences, despite early and persistent protests of Bank staff. He shows how repeatedly and without political accountability the Bank has increased its support for regimes that torture and murder their subjects, from Ceaucescu's Romania to Suharto's Indonesia. Mortgaging the Earth explains the so-called pressure to lend that emerges as a leitmotif in the Bank's fifty-year history and shows how this institutional dynamic has taken on a damaging life of its own. Rich traces the history of the Bank, from its inception at Bretton Woods, where it was conceived as a way to funnelreconstruction loans for war-torn Europe, through the surreally top-down tenure of Robert McNamara to the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. At Rio, governments poured billions of dollars more into the Bank to save our global environment - while the Bank financed new ecological disasters.